Dave Newman of Brewer's Art, Joe Edwardsen of Joe Squared and Chad Wells of Alewife host a snakehead dinner at Alewife on Tuesday, Aug. 23. Brian Strumke of Stillwater Artisinal Ales is creating beer pairings for the event, and Steve Vilnit of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources fiseries service will give an introductory talk. The $65 ticket includes "invasive species passed hors d'ouevres," and a four-course snakehead menu. A very limited number of tickets will be made available via an email lottery on Aug. 19. Watch this space for more information about that.

A report from the Eastern Shore puts the northern snakehead - that slithery, toothy Frankenfish introduced to Central Maryland by some ecological saboteur a decade ago - in Marshyhope Creek, suggesting that the invasive species has moved beyond the Potomac River, across the Chesapeake Bay and into the Delmarva Peninsula. Apparently, these bad boys like to swim as much as they like to eat. Or, here's another theory: Some scoundrel caught a few snakeheads on the Western Shore, transported them across the Bay Bridge and stocked them in either the Marshyhope, east of Hurlock, or the Nanticoke River into which it flows.

Laura Vozzella's snakehead story was published on Huffington Post, which is where I found these hilarious snakehead recipes by Ben Greenman on McSweeney's. Here's one of them. Click here for more. Southern-Style Breaded Amberjack Instructions: In a small bowl, mix mustard, pecans, horseradish, and breadcrumbs. Pat the amberjack filets until dry and coat on both sides with the contents of bowl. Grease an oven tray or dish, place fish on tray, and bake at 350 degrees for eight to twelve minutes.

If we're serious about getting the invasive snakeheads under control before they eat all the other fish in the Chesapeake watershed, then let me suggest that we get serious about the bounty. Those $200 gift certificates from a major outdoors retailer are nice, but there are only three of them, and those who catch a snakehead have to enter a drawing to win them, and the drawing isn't until November. That's not much of an incentive. Let's engage in some bigger thinking about this.

A report from the Eastern Shore puts the northern snakehead - that slithery, toothy Frankenfish introduced to Central Maryland by some ecological saboteur a decade ago - in Marshyhope Creek, suggesting that the invasive species has moved beyond the Potomac River, across the Chesapeake Bay and into the Delmarva Peninsula. Apparently, these bad boys like to swim as much as they like to eat. Or, here's another theory: Some scoundrel caught a few snakeheads on the Western Shore, transported them across the Bay Bridge and stocked them in either the Marshyhope, east of Hurlock, or the Nanticoke River into which it flows.

If we're serious about getting the invasive snakeheads under control before they eat all the other fish in the Chesapeake watershed, then let me suggest that we get serious about the bounty. Those $200 gift certificates from a major outdoors retailer are nice, but there are only three of them, and those who catch a snakehead have to enter a drawing to win them, and the drawing isn't until November. That's not much of an incentive. Let's engage in some bigger thinking about this.

As T-shirt vendors hawked their wares and the curious made a detour from their Sunday morning coffee run, a small boat bobbed in Maryland's most famous pond, spraying the first batch of chemicals that scientists hope will kill the voracious northern snakehead. State fisheries biologists gathered before dawn yesterday in Crofton, and spraying began just after 7 a.m. under the watchful eye of a media horde corralled along a wedge of shoreline by yellow police crime scene tape. The airboat moved slowly back and forth across the homely, nameless pond, the driver directing a stream of two herbicides from a 100-gallon tank into the water.

Chef Chad Wells of Alewife restaurant tossed chunks of raw snakehead fish with cilantro and citrus to make something more ambitious than an $8 ceviche appetizer. It was an invasive-species eradication plan in a martini glass. Wells wants the Asian interloper, which has settled with alarming ease into Chesapeake-area rivers, streams and perhaps the bay itself, to find a new home on restaurant menus. The chef is confident that once diners get a taste of snakehead, they can be counted on to do what they've always done with toothsome fish: wipe them out. "We've proved time and again, the best way to destroy something is get humans involved," Wells said.

By Susan Q. Stranahan and Susan Q. Stranahan,SPECIAL TO THE SUN | September 14, 2003

Snakehead: A Fish out of Water, by Eric Jay Dolin. Smithsonian Books. 240 pages. $24.95. Pity the nation's editors and broadcast executives. They've had to struggle through the dog days of summer 2003 without a snakehead. Last year, they filled hundreds of inches and countless airtime minutes with updates on the discovery and fate of the aquatic invader in a Crofton pond. From June until September 2002, the snakehead saga played out in screaming headlines, hundreds of news stories, film footage, Letterman lists and a couple of forgettable songs.

Pine Lake in Wheaton Regional Park in Montgomery County began slowly refilling with water yesterday after state officials who had drained it in search of northern snakeheads discovered no trace of the vicious Asian fish. An angler hooked a female snakehead at the lake April 26, and Department of Natural Resources officials worried that there might be more of them in the 5-acre lake. DNR officials, working with the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, which manages the park, started draining the lake Thursday.

Snakeheads, which were illegally introduced into the Potomac River as far back as 2004, will continue to have a price on their nasty-looking heads. For the second straight year, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources will be offering prize money as part of a yearlong contest to kill the predators. The top prize is a $200 gift card from Bass Pro Shops. Other prizes include a Maryland State Passport that gives anglers and others free entry to state parks and boat launches as well as discounted boat rentals.

If you spent any time around the Susquehanna River below the Conowingo Dam over the summer, you probably noticed some of the same wanted posters that caught my eye. On those posters is the likeness of a fish, with a warning to anyone who catches one not to release it back into the river. If this fish story sounds a little familiar, maybe it's because recollections of the infamous frankenfish remain fresh in the public imagination, even as the hype has died down and the finned terror known in these parts as the northern snakehead has staked out a territory and established itself as a permanent resident.

Author, chef and National Geographic Fellow Barton Seaver joins eight chefs from Maryland and D.C. for this invasive species dinner benefiting the Oyster Recovery Partnership. Chefs include Baltimore's Spike Gjerde (Woodberry Kitchen) and Chad Wells (Alewife). The dinner , at Rockfish in Annapolis, will feature the chefs' take on the notorious Northern Snakehead, the Blue Catfish and other invasive species. Seaver's book, For Cod and Country, will be available for purchase with a portion of the proceeds donated directly to the Oyster Recovery Partnership.

Dave Newman of Brewer's Art, Joe Edwardsen of Joe Squared and Chad Wells of Alewife host a snakehead dinner at Alewife on Tuesday, Aug. 23. Brian Strumke of Stillwater Artisinal Ales is creating beer pairings for the event, and Steve Vilnit of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources fiseries service will give an introductory talk. The $65 ticket includes "invasive species passed hors d'ouevres," and a four-course snakehead menu. A very limited number of tickets will be made available via an email lottery on Aug. 19. Watch this space for more information about that.

Laura Vozzella's snakehead story was published on Huffington Post, which is where I found these hilarious snakehead recipes by Ben Greenman on McSweeney's. Here's one of them. Click here for more. Southern-Style Breaded Amberjack Instructions: In a small bowl, mix mustard, pecans, horseradish, and breadcrumbs. Pat the amberjack filets until dry and coat on both sides with the contents of bowl. Grease an oven tray or dish, place fish on tray, and bake at 350 degrees for eight to twelve minutes.

Chef Chad Wells of Alewife restaurant tossed chunks of raw snakehead fish with cilantro and citrus to make something more ambitious than an $8 ceviche appetizer. It was an invasive-species eradication plan in a martini glass. Wells wants the Asian interloper, which has settled with alarming ease into Chesapeake-area rivers, streams and perhaps the bay itself, to find a new home on restaurant menus. The chef is confident that once diners get a taste of snakehead, they can be counted on to do what they've always done with toothsome fish: wipe them out. "We've proved time and again, the best way to destroy something is get humans involved," Wells said.

A snag in negotiations with the owner of the snakehead-infested Crofton pond has given the voracious fish from China a temporary reprieve from their pending execution. Neither the MacQuilliam Organization, which owns the pond teeming with northern snakeheads, nor William Berkshire, who owns the two adjacent ponds, has consented to the Department of Natural Resources' plan to poison the pond with a herbicide followed by a fish-killing substance known as rotenone. In letters to DNR Secretary J. Charles Fox this week, the companies said they wanted stronger liability protection to protect them from lawsuits in case any property is damaged or someone is injured during the fish eradication.

As lily pads began to die yesterday on the poisoned, snakehead-infested pond in Crofton, a man on the Eastern Shore was advertising in a local newspaper to sell an "aquarium sized" snakehead for $5. It's perfectly legal, despite the nationwide furor caused this summer by a pair of pet northern snakeheads turned loose in the wild by a Maryland man. Yesterday, the experts who authored the plan to exterminate the Crofton snakeheads urged Maryland to...

A mature, egg-bearing northern snakehead has been discovered by scientists in a river just south of Annapolis, raising the possibility that low salinity in the Chesapeake Bay this year may have allowed the invasive fish to escape from the Potomac River. The 23-inch snakehead was found in the Rhode River last Thursday by biologists from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center taking annual fish samples by net. "The water was very murky with a lot of sediment. When a fish is that large, you assume it's a carp," said Stacey Havard, a Smithsonian biologist.

Hardy, adaptable and prolific. We should all be so lucky. Instead, we are left to curse those traits in northern snakeheads, the toothy aliens that appeared by the hundreds in a tiny Crofton pond in 2002, touched off a national media frenzy and now have made themselves comfortable in the Potomac River. "Thousands and thousands of them" call the Nation's River home, from Georgetown to Mount Vernon to where it empties into the Chesapeake Bay, says Steve Minkkinen, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist.